The first rays of the morning sun streamed through the window. The window was just a porthole, without glass or screen. The ponies used screens to keep out insects, but of course that would be pointless here. The insects were supposed to be in.
This was the changeling hive, if it could even be called that, now that they lived above ground. Their eyes were sensitive to light, and it was difficult for them to stay asleep with even the dimmest of sun. Tornus rolled over in his bed and landed on his hooves. He smacked his tongue a couple times to moisten his mouth, then looked around for what woke him.
His eyes landed on the changeling in the next bed, and that reminded him. He looked down at his own hoof. It was a pale green instead of black. He ran his other hoof down his leg. Solid. No more holes. Right, Tornus remembered. This is who we are now.
The deposal of a queen was not unheard of; some of his older hivemates claimed to remember a time before Queen Chrysalis, but it was nothing like this. For one, sleeping outside of a nice dark cave. King Thorax had assured them that they’d build a new underground hive for sleeping, but since they were now at peace with the ponies, they could spend the days in the open fields. Indeed they would have to, since they now needed to eat food instead of love.
But for all that, they were minor inconveniences rather than real problems. Tornus recalled what it was like before, the constant starvation and fear, both of outside forces and of Queen Chrysalis’s wrath. Even though Thorax had been king for a while now, he hadn’t torn off anyone’s wings or thrown anyone against a wall. So that was a plus.
On the other hoof, he had to work. All the changelings did. It used to be all about hunting, and on the rare occasions when the queen had brought back love to feast on, everyone was free to lounge around. If you didn’t help out with farming or something now, though, you wouldn’t get to eat from the crops or sleep in the hive once it was built. So King Thorax had ruled. “And,” he’d said. “You’ll disappoint everyone else in the hive.” That didn’t make much sense to Tornus, but it had rolled around in the back of his mind.
The one respite they’d had from the labor was when Thorax had brought his friend, a pony named Star…something, Tornus couldn’t remember, to speak to them. The king and the pony had performed a sketch about compromise, and it was something that the changelings were supposed to learn about. But who could learn with so much work to do?
Tornus had breakfast, which consisted of wildflowers and dew. The crops they would plant would be much tastier, but for now this was what they got. Many of the other changelings were there, those who had not gone right out to their designated jobs.
Mostly they ate in silence, but Tornus saw a changeling named Coxa and waved him over. The two of them had hunted together before the overthrow of Chrysalis. Sitting together and eating was more pleasant than eating alone.
As they finished, Coxa asked him, “So what do you have to do today?”
“I’m supposed to plant two acres in the north field. I’ve got to pick up a big bag of seeds and spread it over the field. It sucks. By the middle of the day when the sun gets high, it’s so hot it feels like my wings are going to burn off. I’m so tired by the end that I just want to curl up like a larva.”
“Yeah, well, I have to dig out and clean a room for the new hive. It’s rotten. Until you get deep in it’s all exposed and covered in vines and slime.”
“Mmhm,” Tornus replied. “Well, I guess we better get to it.” They started walking away from the breakfast table, dreading the task ahead, when it felt like a lightning bolt hit him.
“What’s wrong?” asked Coxa.
“I just thought of something. This is just like what King Thorax and Star pony were talking about.”
“Huh?”
“You know, when they all had us sit and watch them talk?”
Coxa paused and chittered while he thought. “Oh! No, that was about having lunch, remember? She wanted honeysuckle or something.”
“No, that’s the thing, it’s not about lunch, it’s about the people having the lunch, and it goes for other things. So, like, what about this? What if we both seed the field and then we both dig out the hive? We could get the field planted before the sun gets too hot, and at the same time the morning sun would dry some of the slime so the digging would be easier.”
“How do we both seed the field?”
Waving his hooves around, Tornus illustrated. “Imagine we both go down a row and spread the seeds, then we skip the row that the other one has done. Half the rows means twice as fast.”
“I’m no good at math.”
“It feels like it’ll work. And…no, wait, it won’t.”
“Why not?” asked Coxa.
“Because we’d do my job first, so there’d be no reason for me to help you with digging out the hive. I’d say I would, and then not do it, this way I’d only work half a day and you’d get in trouble for not finishing your work.”
“Oh, right. Shame about that. It seemed like a good plan.”
They started to head in different directions when Coxa pulled up short. “Wait!”
“What?”
“I just had a…what was it…an idea? Yeah. So, what if, instead of doing that, you…didn’t?”
“I don’t get it,” said Tornus.
“Like, you tell me that you’ll help dig the hive and I help you with the planting, but then, you actually do help me dig the hive.”
Tornus stared ahead blankly for a few seconds, then smiled. “Oh! I didn’t think of that. Let’s try it!”
***
“Oh, we screwed up bad this time. We are so dead.”
“I know, right? Where did we go wrong? King Thorax is going to rip our wings off for sure,” Coxa held his head in his hooves.
“But, he hasn’t done that, right? Maybe we’ll get away with just being thrown out of the hive.”
“Are you sure you got the right time?”
“The changeling in the next chamber said it was four o’clock. And it’s got to be, the sun’s still high in the sky.” Tornus flew out to the mouth of the tunnel leading to the new hive. Yeah, it’s still up there. We are so dead,” he repeated.
“What did we miss? What did we forget? This is what comes from trying to make plans instead of just following orders. This is all my fault for finding that mistake.”
“No, it’s my fault for thinking of it in the first place. And I still don’t see where we went wrong. "If one changeling can do one job in ten hours, then two changelings should do two jobs in ten hours. Not eight!”
They sat with their backs to the hive wall as though they were in a prison. Their wings drooped on the ground.
After a minute, Coxa said, “Is there anything we can do?”
“I’m trying to think of something, even though it was my thinking of something that got us into this mess. What if we went back to the field and picked up the seeds, then put them down again?”
“That’d take more than two hours, so we’d be even worse.”
“Mm, you’re right,” said Tornus.
“The only thing to do is tell the king and beg for mercy.”
They plodded down the path to the center of the grounds where Thorax had set up his temporary seat. On the way they passed the breakfast table and Tornus spat at the ground. There was the place where they had met that morning before their day was ruined.
“Something wrong?” they heard. Looking up, they saw the pony that had been invited to teach them. The king’s friend. She was sitting at the table in the sun. Of course she had no work to do.
“We are looking for King Thorax,” Coxa said. “I messed up at work and need to be punished.”
“No, it was my mess up,” Tornus interjected before Starlight could reply.
“Both of us, then.”
“Why don’t you tell me about it?” Starlight asked, patting the seat next to her.
So they confessed everything, their conspiracy and insubordination and how they found themselves finished with work too soon. They could see her grin getting wider throughout the story, the same expression they’d seen on Queen Chrysalis whenever she’d get ready to exact harsh punishment on some changeling.
“…and on our way to tell the king and beg for mercy we ran into you.”
“I see. Well, why don’t I go in and tell Thorax about everything? I can put it in the best light.”
The two changelings looked at each other and nodded. Clearly she was a close friend as she didn’t even use his royal title. Maybe she could plead for clemency.
“But,” she continued, “while I speak to him, I want you to try to think about what might have happened, why you finished earlier than you thought you should have. Here’s a hint: was the work harder with the two of you?”
Starlight trotted off, and the changelings only found confusion in each other’s eyes. “What did that mean?” asked Coxa.
“I don’t know, but I guess we should do what she says. Why would the work being harder make it go quicker?”
“I don’t know.”
“If anything, it felt easier because we were talking all day and getting to change jobs halfway through kept it fresh, plus we got out of the sun before it got hot. I don’t get it!” Tornus waved his hooves to the sky.
They heard the sound of approaching hoofbeats, and saw the light green of Thorax approaching. He came all the way up to them and they leaped off the ground to beg at his hooves, but before they reached the ground he scooped them up in an embrace. “I’m so proud of you!” he said.
Tornus and Coxa were speechless as he put them down. Starlight laughed. “You two didn’t mess up, you did well. You went against everything you were trained by Chrysalis to do. She taught you to betray, to feel spite for another’s misfortune, and to only see each other as part of a swarm. Instead you stayed faithful to each other and eased the other’s burden. The reason you finished early is that you were working harder, and that’s because neither of you wanted to let the other do more than he had to.”
Tornus found his voice first. “But, it didn’t feel harder. We were just saying it was almost…fun.”
“That’s right,” Thorax said, “you accomplished more than you would have otherwise and for less effort.”
“But that’s like magic!”
“A very special kind of magic. That’s friendship.”
Coxa’s quivered as he realized he wasn’t going to be punished. Boldly he asked the king, “So, can Tornus and I work together tomorrow and plant another field and dig more of the hive?”
“No.” Thorax tried to glower, but he was still smiling.
“Oh. OK.”
“You two have a more important job to do. You need to go to all the others and tell them what happened to you. That we want more of that. But you can work together, as much as you want.”
The two changelings smiled. This new life wasn’t so bad after all.
